Avoiding distraction in this century is a battle. This may be the hardest problem of the 21st century. I have been losing that battle. While distractions have always pulled at my thoughts, today there are massive companies like Facebook and Google and Amazon plotting how to better and more completely distract me. The battle for my attention is unfair, as we are outgunned, but life is unfair. I know that prayer is a battle and was never meant to be easy. This is not the easy path. I think that’s the one reason so many people avoid it today.

Today I give a large portion of my time to my device. The companies that benefit from my attention serve their own purposes, not mine, and certainly not God’s. I am being engineered and manipulated to fritter away my time and to doubt my greater purpose. The greatest lie I am told, that we have been told, is that we are connected to others and can be fulfilled by worldly things, while I isolate with my device and orient my heart away from more meaningful things.

The two commandments of the Gospels are very simple. 1.) To love God with all of my heart, mind, and soul, and 2.) To love one another. Do the tech companies appear to be pushing me in that direction? It is said that you cannot serve God and man. Which of these am I serving today?

“He who follows me can never walk in darkness,” our Lord says…if we want to see our way truly, never a trace of blindness left in our hearts, it is his life, his character, we must take for our model. Clearly, then, we must make it our chief business to train our thoughts upon the life of Jesus.

Book 1, paragraph 1 from the Imitation of Christ

I try to heed the words of warning to not walk in darkness, but it’s hard today. To keep my head up, not down, away from the phone is a challenge. When not staring at the phone, then it’s hard to avoid staring at a TV, where I fall for advertising gimmicks and good looking actresses. Sometimes when I see a bunch of moths hovering around a porch light at night on the patio, I think to myself…we are not that different from those little creatures. Show us a light on a phone or TV and we will gather and stare. For example, I love meeting friends for lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings and the whole reason I do is because there are fifty TVs on the walls, all flashing lights. We go from one lighted screen to another, all day long. Even in bathrooms and while pumping gas there are screens that instantly suck us in to watch. We’re worse than moths for clinging to these screens.

Our minds are easily entertained by dancing shadows of light. But the lights from technology are the wrong ones to chase, and my moth brain needs to realize that there is a greater light called the lumen fidei, the light of faith. The light of reason, like the porch lightbulb, pulled me away for many years from the real light. Oddly enough it was experience and reason that brought me back to the true light, the light of faith. I think of how many times I would scroll on my phone or watch an entire season of a Netflix show and feel worse. To empty my mind of distractions and open my heart to God requires more effort than scrolling or chilling on the couch. It requires a daily effort.

Ignoring the latest argument or scandal or meme on the internet means stepping outside of the flow of modern thought. Tomorrow those scandals will be different and they will fade away. Turn off the political propaganda - how can I do this? By getting off the phone. To stop from clicking onto pornography sites, that requires a choice. Millions, maybe billions, of men silently struggle with the lights of porn and they don’t talk about it. To ignore the screens and ads that promise pleasure, material, honor, wealth, and power, a set of tools is needed. Everyone must face this sales pitch that attempts to steal our attention. The answer is to turn the page on escapes and fantasies. First of all, I can start acting like an adult today. How many times have I seen a shirt say, “I can’t adult today.” Not only are we like moths chasing lights, we refuse to grow up because, frankly, many of our lives have been lived in comfort and without challenge to grow up. There is a quote from G.K. Chesterton that fits here. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

We just want to keep things the same, nice and easy, to be left alone to be with our gossip, scandal, porn, and politics. The only problem with that is then nothing changes in our heart, and surely most people have a nagging idea in the back of their minds, asking them, “Is this really all there is?”

The answer is simple but it’s hard to face the question honestly, especially when you spend adulthood pretending that the question isn’t bothering you. The answer was in the thing I put on a box and kicked to the curb. I never even gave it a chance once I started chasing the lights of this world. And if you’ve read or listened to Why Did Peter Sink? from the beginning, you know the whole story of how hard it was to know where to even start. From the Streetlight God to today, it’s a long and slow path. The difficult thing is that until you set down that bag of bricks that you carry - your politics, your obsession with sex, your want of money, your need for approval - you cannot even get started. I know many people that say they can never consider faith because of some public policy that some group of faithful are championing. And they are right - because they cannot surrender to win, they will always be white-knuckling their hold on that bag of bricks. You may have heard that masturbation causes blindness, but it’s actually our ego that causes blindness. Spiritual blindness is the plague of the 21st century because we’ve been wholly sold on the self. The reason movies like Fight Club did so well with men is because it tapped into the emptiness that is universal among men who have lost faith in God. The moth brain has fallen for the fool’s gold, and Tyler Durden hit the nail on the head with this quote in the movie:

“Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

And the answer to this riddle is so stupidly simple that no one wants to hear it. The reason men are so pissed off if because they have been worshipping things that have replaced that which gives meaning to our lives. And once those things do not produce the expected result, we are angry. And the reason is that they are not God. They are the things of this world. Our hearts are wired for something beyond and are disappointed in anything less.

Sounds easy, and to get started it is easy. It’s hard to maintain but it’s easy to start. Even if you attempt to pray and think you don’t know how, you are already praying by attempting it. The best prayer I know is this one liner:

“God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Say it ten times in earnest and it will be a true prayer for you. Then the distractions will come…don’t worry - the phone won’t forget about you, because you can’t forget about it. Use silent mode or hide the damn thing for a while. The mind provides ample distraction alone, you don’t also need a phone to aid and abet the wandering consciousness. Try not to follow the distraction but stay put in the moment. Here’s one quote from the Catechism for you, as again, it usually makes the point so much better than I can (from the section titled, The Battle of Prayer:)

The habitual difficulty in prayer is distraction…To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap, when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve. (CCC 2725-2745)

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